So I’ve been working through the Yakuza series over the past couple years, and despite what my… rather slow pace (one game a year, so far) would tell you, I’ve been enjoying my time with them! As a whole, the series has… a pretty undeniable formula attached to it, but one that’s so effective it’s hard to really knock the games down for it: the hybrid beat-em-up with RPG elements makes it really addictive to just style and totally not kill all the thugs that come your way, and the open world cities you get to explore are so expansive, with oodles of sidequests and new game modes and minigames you can discover so long as you’re willing to take the scenic route. Yakuza 0, of the three I’ve played so far, has pretty easily been the highlight so far: with a plot that makes the most of its two protagonists and cities to intertwine into something that I was super invested in by the end, with just an insane amount of content that the 72 hours I played only felt like it was scratching the surface. Yakuza Kiwami, on the other hand, felt like a downgrade. It was still fun to play, but a lot of it just felt… honestly like a way stripped-down version of 0, in terms of the places you could go and the things you could do, and the few iterations that were there felt like straight downgrades. However, when I started playing Kiwami 2, I felt an immediate, immense improvement, and as I continued going through the game, and continued to have… quite a lot more fun than I did with Kiwami 1, I figured ‘hey, I like this series, enough to consider getting 100% for at least one of them, why not this one? It might be fun.’
It wasn’t!
It was kind of a pain, actually!
Like, I’m not one to try and get 100% for games usually, mostly because it’s just not my vibe or the way I play games, but here in particular… getting 100% was kind of rough. The appeal of games as vast as this to me is that you can kind of pick and choose what you want to do: if you find a side thing that’s super addictive, you can pursue it to your heart's content — I can attest to getting obsessed and completing an entire six-hour side-mode in the space of, like, a single night. If there’s something you don’t vibe with, well, then, you don’t have to! You can just ignore it, choose something else, and never have to deal with it… unless you have to for 100%. Anything you only gave a surface-level glance at because you weren’t really into it is now something you have to go into in-depth, and any issues that might have been dealbreakers are now things you have no choice but to deal with in your quest to get that completion list checked off. I wouldn’t really say it made a notable impact on my enjoyment of my overall product — I can recognize that doing this was my mistake and not necessarily an indictment on the game — but… I’d be lying if I said that going for full-game completion made me more aware of things I would’ve been willing to ignore before, and made things that were little problems… quite a bit more pleasant.
The game follows the continued adventures of ex-yakuza Kazuma Kiryu, who… okay I know this review has started out notably negative for something I gave an 8/10 but I could barely follow what was going on this time around. I could kind of get what was going on until chapter 5 or so, but then it just feels like everything gets sidetracked in the midst of exploring the mythology and interfacing with oodles of characters who… precede to either bite it or just never appear beyond this game. It all coalesces into something simple that can essentially be boiled down to ‘these are the bad guys, beat them up,’ but in the midst of everything the billed main antagonist, and the supposed rival Dragon to Kiryu… honestly feels sidelined in his own game, only popping up occasionally to establish that he is, in fact, the antagonist and rival, and that he and Kiryu are finally going to have that showdown even- whoops actually this is all about the Korean mafia actually time to focus on them. Kiwami had similar problems, but I felt like it managed to sidestep them — for as much as it does feel derivative gameplay-wise of 0, having many of the same characters appear in the prequel does give them more of an impact here, and Kiryu’s relationship with many of the major figures (especially with his goddaughter, Haruka, or with his rivalry with Majima) provided a throughline that… even when things felt confusing or convoluted, I still felt connected. Here, there were moments I enjoyed, but as a whole, I tended to put the story on hold because going to do it often felt like I was pulled away from the things I liked just so I could watch cutscenes for half an hour.
At least when I was finally free to explore the city and just do what I want, or when the cutscenes end and I’m allowed to actually do stuff, the gameplay really kicks in. Enemy encounters are simple, but addictive. It’s like a 3D beat-em-up — you’re surrounded by dudes, usually five to one, but those dudes are usually always much weaker than you, and combat often comes down to how much you just want to style on them. You can buy or pick up different weapons which change up your moveset, and should you hit your opponents enough time your heat gauge fills up, allowing you, amongst other options, to perform one of many context-based super moves on your opponent, often just absolutely fucking them up in a way that makes you question if they’re actually able to get up again afterwards. Power — and the vast gulf between Kiryu and the random thugs who fight him on the street — is kind of the name of the game. There are just so many options for items you can get or things you can do to your opponents, like stealing their weapons from them, getting one of your friends or allies to do something nasty to them, or, my favourite: doing a grab on them, and then trying to aim so that when you throw them they sail over a railing, off a bridge, and into the river below. There are a lot of options in just how you can demolish encounters, and part of the appeal is just seeing what you can do.
It’s not all a cakewalk, though, and when you’re up against somebody a bit closer to your level, they let you know. There’s a surprising amount of depth in your defensive options, between your parry and your guard and your quickstep, and while I was… a bit too button mashy of a gamer to really focus on those as opposed to tunnel-visioning on heat moves, it’s nice that they’re there and that they’re things that get used when the game requires you to get good. Boss encounters, in particular, are where the combat of this game can be at its best, and while they can be easy to breeze past with boosted stats if you did a lot of side stuff like I did there’s still a lot to enjoy: the spectacle, the varied movesets the player can try to learn, and all the different arenas that both you and the enemy can use against each other. I especially love the way Kiwami 2 utilizes the heat mechanic in boss battles: when a boss is on their last health bar, the fight stops, and you have to rapidly press a button to gather heat and unleash it: should you do so, you enter a quick time event that allows you to potentially instantly (and brutally) end a fight. It’s an improvement over Kiwami’s attempt at the same system (one where the boss will just rapidly regenerate their health unless you use one of the same three heat moves on them), and it’s a great way of ending a fight and ensuring your victory, bringing your opponent down to the same level as all the common thugs around the city.
But really the appeal to this game is the wealth of things you can do on the side. While Yakuza 1 (and Kiwami) mostly played its interactions with the Japanese underworld straight, 2 finds room instead to get a little more adventurous with things, and it stands out all the more for it. So many of the substories just go in wild directions and it's so entertaining to see Kiryu be the straight man in all these wacky scenarios. I appreciate, also, how much of a period piece this feels. I don’t know whether this was stuff originally in Yakuza 2, or whether Kiwami 2 added this stuff in hindsight, but I love how what was initially intended as a picture of modern-day Japan instead became a period piece, featuring all the innovations of the era that are so obviously outdated today. The sidemodes, too, profess some fairly fun writing: the stories themselves are fairly simple, which allows them to lean fairly hard on their cast of fun and quirky characters, all of which you can spend time with via hangouts and sometimes even sidequests attached to these specific characters. While there were definitely moments I enjoyed during the main story, I think it’s when I trod off the beaten path and explored the side content that I most enjoyed the game’s writing.
Of course, even then, the side content wouldn’t have measured up if it weren’t at least fun to go through, which, luckily, a good portion of it was! I mentioned above in my preamble that one of the benefits of games like these where there’s just a lot of stuff to do is that you can pick and choose what you actually want to go through, and while going for 100% meant I had to do stuff I also thought was kinda lame, I can’t deny that I still really enjoyed a lot of the side content here. Two favourites, in particular, were karaoke and the Cabaret Club Czar, the former being a series staple I frequently returned to even after I’d done everything I needed to do there because I liked trying to get a perfect score and also wanted to see all the special animations with the people you can take there, and the latter, a return from Yakuza 0 (being the minigame mentioned above where I just hyperfocused it over the course of an entire weekend), now considerably less grindy and with little iterations that make the whole experience feel better. While going for 100% does kind of expose you to the… less than stellar bits of side content, it also makes you take a look at stuff you might have overlooked before, and give you a chance to experience and change your mind about it. I’d never gone to the colosseum of bonus bosses in either of the two Yakuza games beforehand (mostly because I think when I unlocked it in 0 I was at the point where I was powering forward to finish the game), but doing it for the first time for 100% this game… actually proved fun, even despite me being a good bit over-levelled for it. There are things here I’d definitely do if I ever see them again in a future game, and I guess I should thank the 100% run for exposing me to it.
One last note, and one maybe less relevant to this game than to the series as a whole: I often feel like these games are low-key really bad at trying to teach the player its concepts? Maybe it’s just due to the way my brain is wired, but oftentimes instead of actually demonstrating or showing how to do something it’ll instead display a giant wall of text and hope the player retains all the things they need to know, no matter how simple or complex the mechanic is. And unless you’re able to retain everything you need to know — or so long as you’re okay with looking it up again and again — you’re just going to approach certain parts of, say, a minigame, and have no clue what to do. And that’s if the manual itself teaches you what you need to know: the tutorial for mahjong, on the last page, goes ‘oh by the way you could have a valid winning deck but it won’t actually count unless it’s yaku’ without ever explaining what yaku is. I had to google it just so I could know what that meant and nothing I found really gave me a conclusive answer. Again, not as bad here as it is in say, 0, but given that this is the third Yakuza game in a row that seems to think that drowning them in text is equal to being able to teach them how to play it… my impression is that this isn’t a problem that’s going to be fixed anytime soon.
But as a whole, and despite how negative parts of this review may seem, I enjoyed my experience with Kiwami 2! I won’t lie in that 100%ing it was kind of a pain, and… definitely not something I’m going to make the mistake of doing again, but between the combat, and the very fun side content, it’s not a decision I think I really minded in the end, and if I’m held at gunpoint and told to 100% another Yakuza game… I don’t think I’d end up having too much of a bad time. 8/10.
It wasn’t!
It was kind of a pain, actually!
Like, I’m not one to try and get 100% for games usually, mostly because it’s just not my vibe or the way I play games, but here in particular… getting 100% was kind of rough. The appeal of games as vast as this to me is that you can kind of pick and choose what you want to do: if you find a side thing that’s super addictive, you can pursue it to your heart's content — I can attest to getting obsessed and completing an entire six-hour side-mode in the space of, like, a single night. If there’s something you don’t vibe with, well, then, you don’t have to! You can just ignore it, choose something else, and never have to deal with it… unless you have to for 100%. Anything you only gave a surface-level glance at because you weren’t really into it is now something you have to go into in-depth, and any issues that might have been dealbreakers are now things you have no choice but to deal with in your quest to get that completion list checked off. I wouldn’t really say it made a notable impact on my enjoyment of my overall product — I can recognize that doing this was my mistake and not necessarily an indictment on the game — but… I’d be lying if I said that going for full-game completion made me more aware of things I would’ve been willing to ignore before, and made things that were little problems… quite a bit more pleasant.
The game follows the continued adventures of ex-yakuza Kazuma Kiryu, who… okay I know this review has started out notably negative for something I gave an 8/10 but I could barely follow what was going on this time around. I could kind of get what was going on until chapter 5 or so, but then it just feels like everything gets sidetracked in the midst of exploring the mythology and interfacing with oodles of characters who… precede to either bite it or just never appear beyond this game. It all coalesces into something simple that can essentially be boiled down to ‘these are the bad guys, beat them up,’ but in the midst of everything the billed main antagonist, and the supposed rival Dragon to Kiryu… honestly feels sidelined in his own game, only popping up occasionally to establish that he is, in fact, the antagonist and rival, and that he and Kiryu are finally going to have that showdown even- whoops actually this is all about the Korean mafia actually time to focus on them. Kiwami had similar problems, but I felt like it managed to sidestep them — for as much as it does feel derivative gameplay-wise of 0, having many of the same characters appear in the prequel does give them more of an impact here, and Kiryu’s relationship with many of the major figures (especially with his goddaughter, Haruka, or with his rivalry with Majima) provided a throughline that… even when things felt confusing or convoluted, I still felt connected. Here, there were moments I enjoyed, but as a whole, I tended to put the story on hold because going to do it often felt like I was pulled away from the things I liked just so I could watch cutscenes for half an hour.
At least when I was finally free to explore the city and just do what I want, or when the cutscenes end and I’m allowed to actually do stuff, the gameplay really kicks in. Enemy encounters are simple, but addictive. It’s like a 3D beat-em-up — you’re surrounded by dudes, usually five to one, but those dudes are usually always much weaker than you, and combat often comes down to how much you just want to style on them. You can buy or pick up different weapons which change up your moveset, and should you hit your opponents enough time your heat gauge fills up, allowing you, amongst other options, to perform one of many context-based super moves on your opponent, often just absolutely fucking them up in a way that makes you question if they’re actually able to get up again afterwards. Power — and the vast gulf between Kiryu and the random thugs who fight him on the street — is kind of the name of the game. There are just so many options for items you can get or things you can do to your opponents, like stealing their weapons from them, getting one of your friends or allies to do something nasty to them, or, my favourite: doing a grab on them, and then trying to aim so that when you throw them they sail over a railing, off a bridge, and into the river below. There are a lot of options in just how you can demolish encounters, and part of the appeal is just seeing what you can do.
It’s not all a cakewalk, though, and when you’re up against somebody a bit closer to your level, they let you know. There’s a surprising amount of depth in your defensive options, between your parry and your guard and your quickstep, and while I was… a bit too button mashy of a gamer to really focus on those as opposed to tunnel-visioning on heat moves, it’s nice that they’re there and that they’re things that get used when the game requires you to get good. Boss encounters, in particular, are where the combat of this game can be at its best, and while they can be easy to breeze past with boosted stats if you did a lot of side stuff like I did there’s still a lot to enjoy: the spectacle, the varied movesets the player can try to learn, and all the different arenas that both you and the enemy can use against each other. I especially love the way Kiwami 2 utilizes the heat mechanic in boss battles: when a boss is on their last health bar, the fight stops, and you have to rapidly press a button to gather heat and unleash it: should you do so, you enter a quick time event that allows you to potentially instantly (and brutally) end a fight. It’s an improvement over Kiwami’s attempt at the same system (one where the boss will just rapidly regenerate their health unless you use one of the same three heat moves on them), and it’s a great way of ending a fight and ensuring your victory, bringing your opponent down to the same level as all the common thugs around the city.
But really the appeal to this game is the wealth of things you can do on the side. While Yakuza 1 (and Kiwami) mostly played its interactions with the Japanese underworld straight, 2 finds room instead to get a little more adventurous with things, and it stands out all the more for it. So many of the substories just go in wild directions and it's so entertaining to see Kiryu be the straight man in all these wacky scenarios. I appreciate, also, how much of a period piece this feels. I don’t know whether this was stuff originally in Yakuza 2, or whether Kiwami 2 added this stuff in hindsight, but I love how what was initially intended as a picture of modern-day Japan instead became a period piece, featuring all the innovations of the era that are so obviously outdated today. The sidemodes, too, profess some fairly fun writing: the stories themselves are fairly simple, which allows them to lean fairly hard on their cast of fun and quirky characters, all of which you can spend time with via hangouts and sometimes even sidequests attached to these specific characters. While there were definitely moments I enjoyed during the main story, I think it’s when I trod off the beaten path and explored the side content that I most enjoyed the game’s writing.
Of course, even then, the side content wouldn’t have measured up if it weren’t at least fun to go through, which, luckily, a good portion of it was! I mentioned above in my preamble that one of the benefits of games like these where there’s just a lot of stuff to do is that you can pick and choose what you actually want to go through, and while going for 100% meant I had to do stuff I also thought was kinda lame, I can’t deny that I still really enjoyed a lot of the side content here. Two favourites, in particular, were karaoke and the Cabaret Club Czar, the former being a series staple I frequently returned to even after I’d done everything I needed to do there because I liked trying to get a perfect score and also wanted to see all the special animations with the people you can take there, and the latter, a return from Yakuza 0 (being the minigame mentioned above where I just hyperfocused it over the course of an entire weekend), now considerably less grindy and with little iterations that make the whole experience feel better. While going for 100% does kind of expose you to the… less than stellar bits of side content, it also makes you take a look at stuff you might have overlooked before, and give you a chance to experience and change your mind about it. I’d never gone to the colosseum of bonus bosses in either of the two Yakuza games beforehand (mostly because I think when I unlocked it in 0 I was at the point where I was powering forward to finish the game), but doing it for the first time for 100% this game… actually proved fun, even despite me being a good bit over-levelled for it. There are things here I’d definitely do if I ever see them again in a future game, and I guess I should thank the 100% run for exposing me to it.
One last note, and one maybe less relevant to this game than to the series as a whole: I often feel like these games are low-key really bad at trying to teach the player its concepts? Maybe it’s just due to the way my brain is wired, but oftentimes instead of actually demonstrating or showing how to do something it’ll instead display a giant wall of text and hope the player retains all the things they need to know, no matter how simple or complex the mechanic is. And unless you’re able to retain everything you need to know — or so long as you’re okay with looking it up again and again — you’re just going to approach certain parts of, say, a minigame, and have no clue what to do. And that’s if the manual itself teaches you what you need to know: the tutorial for mahjong, on the last page, goes ‘oh by the way you could have a valid winning deck but it won’t actually count unless it’s yaku’ without ever explaining what yaku is. I had to google it just so I could know what that meant and nothing I found really gave me a conclusive answer. Again, not as bad here as it is in say, 0, but given that this is the third Yakuza game in a row that seems to think that drowning them in text is equal to being able to teach them how to play it… my impression is that this isn’t a problem that’s going to be fixed anytime soon.
But as a whole, and despite how negative parts of this review may seem, I enjoyed my experience with Kiwami 2! I won’t lie in that 100%ing it was kind of a pain, and… definitely not something I’m going to make the mistake of doing again, but between the combat, and the very fun side content, it’s not a decision I think I really minded in the end, and if I’m held at gunpoint and told to 100% another Yakuza game… I don’t think I’d end up having too much of a bad time. 8/10.